As an increasing number of applications and services are being made available over networks such as the Internet, an increasing number of content, application, and/or service providers are turning to technologies such as cloud computing. Cloud computing, in general, is an approach to providing access to electronic resources through services, such as Web services, where the hardware and/or software used to support those services is dynamically scalable to meet the needs of the services at any given time. A user or customer typically will rent, lease, or otherwise pay for access to resources through the cloud, and thus does not have to purchase and maintain the hardware and/or software needed.
In this context, many cloud computing providers utilize virtualization to allow multiple users to share the underlying hardware and/or software resources. Virtualization can allow computing servers, storage device or other resources to be partitioned into multiple isolated instances that are associated with (e.g. owned by) a particular user. In many cases, the underlying technology used to enable virtualization utilizes memory sharing mechanisms or other tools to communicate information between these isolated instances or virtual machines. For example, input/output (I/O) virtualization provides a way to abstract the guest operating systems and other upper layer protocols from the physical connections with the hardware. However, while virtualized I/O is useful in shared and secured environments, it often tends to suffer from performance problems, such as low throughput, high latency and high latency jitter.